A new report by the Committee of Experts which monitors compliance with the Council of Europe’s European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages acknowledges that Romania has a solid legal framework and policies for the protection of minority languages, including in education, but regrets that the population threshold for their use in the administration is too high.
The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages applies to 20 languages in Romania. Ten languages (Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, German, Hungarian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Turkish and Ukrainian) enjoy higher protection since Romania has made additional commitments to promoting them in public life, particularly as regards their use in education, justice, public administration, media, economic and social life, culture, and transfrontier exchanges. The Charter also protects Albanian, Armenian, Greek, Italian, Macedonian, Polish, Romani, Ruthenian, Tatar and Yiddish.
The Committee highlights that Romania’s system for protecting minority languages shows best practices in many areas. However, the Committee expresses its concern that the 20% threshold in national legislation for the use of minority languages in the administration seems to be too high and, if applied inflexibly, deprives speakers of minority languages of the full protection provided by the Charter.
Considering that Romani is spoken as a mother tongue by at least 199,000 persons in the country and that it is estimated that the number of speakers is much higher, the Committee recommends that the Romanian authorities further promote the presence of Romani in public life, particularly in education.
A summary of the evaluation report is also available in Romanian.
The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and Romania
